Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  An art critic for the Sunday Times wrote that by 1917 it was clear that the two artists who had most to say about the Great War, and who said it most eloquently and innovatively, were Nash and Nevinson.51 When Varley arrived in London, Nash had a solo exhibition, War Paintings and Drawings, on display at the Leicester Galleries. The twenty-eight-year-old Nash began his career as a landscapist, producing, in the years before the war, haunting and symbol-charged watercolours of the English countryside. In 1912 he wrote dreamily to a friend that he painted his landscapes “not for the landscape’s sake, but for ‘the things behind,’ the dwellers in the innermost: whose light shines through sometimes.” 52 Seeing the Home Counties through this idealizing lens was easy enough; the battlefields of Flanders were another matter. Dispatched to the front as a war artist in November 1917, he discovered these dwellers in the innermost, at least at Passchendaele, to be horrifying entities. In a letter to his wife he described the Western Front as “the most frightful nightmare . . . unspeakable, utterly undescribable.” His sketches of the nightmarish landscape gave, he told her, only “a vague idea of its horror,” but The Times reviewer was astonished at the facility with which Nash captured “utter chaos” and showed “a world dead for a million years, frozen and without atmosphere . . . It is waste—a waste of worlds, of ages, which looks as if it had been made by some indifferent world of Nature.” 53

  Nevinson, whose work Varley was also shown, arrived back from the Western Front with equally disconcerting images. Likewise only twenty-eight, he had been one England’s most notorious artists at the outset of the war, a friend of Italian Futurists such as Marinetti and a former studiomate in Paris of Amedeo Modigliani. With Marinetti he composed a manifesto for English art that (in a long list of pungent dicta) denounced “effeminacy” and the “worship of tradition,” and called instead for a “strong, virile and anti-sentimental” art.54 His most famous painting, Tum-tiddly-um-tum-pom-pom, tried to capture the frenzied motion of a London crowd. In 1914 Nevinson believed that war was “the world’s only hygiene,” and that it would be, as he enthusiastically predicted early in 1915, “a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe that there is no beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness.” 55 Service in Flanders as a mechanic and ambulance driver quickly dampened his enthusiasm for strife and aggressiveness, and a nervous breakdown followed. His artistic style remained intact: Futurism offered, he maintained, “the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence, and brutality of the emotions seen and felt.” 56

  Nevinson was attached to the cwmf in July 1917. The following spring he, like Nash, showed work in the Leicester Galleries at an exhibition opened by Beaverbrook himself. A newspaper reported that Nevinson “stated the facts of the war without the slightest attempt to gloss over the inevitable horrors.” 57 Paintings included After a Push, purchased by the Imperial War Museum and described in another newspaper as “a desolate collection of shell-holes filled with water and as large as ponds.” 58 Another of his works, Paths of Glory, showing two dead British soldiers facedown in the mud, was deemed too terrible for public viewing. It provoked the ire of the military authorities, so Nevinson pasted over it a sheet of brown paper chalked with the word “Censored” (for which he received an additional rebuke from the War Office: the word “censored,” he was informed, was censored). An art critic managed to peel back enough of the paper to see barbed wire, the butt of a rifle and a khaki cap.59

  Varley was impressed by the efforts of Nash and Nevinson. He realized the necessity of approaching his task with a modern technique similar to theirs. It would not be possible, he wrote to Maud, to produce “lovely tones and lovely colours and lovely drawing and all that bunkum when . . . the disembowelled earth is festering and flinging off an abortive stench.” Reiterating what the Algonquin Park School had been saying about the Canadian landscape, he told her that “no art conceived in the past can express the hugeness of the present.” 60 Modern warfare, like the vast and inhospitable landscape of Canada, called for new artistic forms.

  VARLEY WAS TAKEN with the work of another artist whose work he saw in London. Jackson was back in London in April, having spent the early spring with an artillery brigade at Liévin, near Lens, in northern France. The sight of the war-ravaged countryside enthralled and appalled him in equal measures. The misty atmosphere and idyllic landscape of this region of northern France were once celebrated in paintings such as Camille Corot’s A Pond in Picardy, not to mention the work of the École d’Étaples with which Jackson was so familiar. But now it was, he wrote, a “seemingly empty country, cut up by old trench lines, gun pits, old shell holes, ruins of villages and farmhouses.” 61

  At one point, in the company of Augustus John, who was glorying in a major’s uniform and tackling a huge canvas for the cwmf called The Pageant of War, Jackson had witnessed an Allied gas attack on the German line. Artists like Apollinaire were able to detach themselves—however briefly and temporarily—from the horrors of warfare in order to appreciate its aesthetic effects. After seeing rocket flares soaring through the night sky, Apollinaire began his poem “Wonder of War” with the lines: “How lovely these flares are that light up the dark / They climb their own peak and lean down to look / They are dancing ladies whose glances become eyes, arms and hearts.” 62 Despite his horrific first-hand experience at Sanctuary Wood, Jackson too was spellbound by the sight of coloured lights coursing through the fog bank of gas. “It was like a wonderful display of fireworks,” he wrote, “with the clouds of gas and the German flares and rockets of all colours.” 63

  Back in London, in an attempt to capture this macabre beauty, he painted Gas Attack, Liévin, showing an undulating foreground reminiscent of Terre sauvage and a sky aglow with flares. Another painting from this period was Springtime in Picardy, which presents a tree in bloom against the backdrop of a devastated village through which two soldiers nonchalantly stroll, oblivious to beauty and horror alike. Once again there are poetic analogues. The work features the same juxtaposition of the pastoral and the infernal found in several Great War poems, such as Wilfred Owen’s “Exposure,” which describes soldiers hunkered down in foxholes briefly imagining the benevolence of nature: “So we drowse, sun-dozed, / Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.” The same play on the absurdly incongruous fit between mechanized warfare and the beauty of nature can also be found in John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” with its roar of artillery set against a shattered idyll of poppies, larks and glowing sunsets.64

  If Springtime in Picardy suggests the possibility of peace and renewal, or at least the continuation of the natural cycle despite mankind’s devastation, Jackson’s most powerful and expressive work from this time offered no such promise. Called Liévin, March 1918, it featured a distant watchtower and a foreground of shattered, windowless houses and the slithering lines of a battlefield that included barbed wire and two white crosses. The colours were bloody and brooding—greys, blacks, reds and oranges—and the painting filled with tortuous lines suggesting quagmire and collapse. If some of the English avant-garde painters were expressing the “waste of worlds” with jagged edges and sharp planes—as Paul Nash did in his remarkable Void—Jackson, at least in Liévin, March 1918, did so with writhing and distorted lines that make their way like tentacles across the picture plane.

  Jackson and Varley spent much time together in Jackson’s studio. The two men discussed Thomson and plans for future sketching expeditions into the bush, to places such as Canoe Lake. Varley confided to Maud that although Jackson was not “such a man as Tom,” he believed that “we two would manage and pull along well.” His newly favourable opinion came from the fact that he found Jackson changed from the man he last saw more than three years ago. He was now “more sensitive,” chastened by his experiences on the Western Front. “I’m sure if he had to go through the fight anymore,” he wrote to Maud, “he would be broken.”

  Earlier differences of
opinion were set aside as Jackson regaled the new recruit about the difficulty of painting at the front and Varley expressed sincere admiration for his comrade’s work. He wrote to Maud that Jackson was painting “impassive desolate scenes of the country which once was.” In doing so, he had become, Varley believed, “a great artist.” He was inspired but also daunted by the fact that he needed to accomplish similar things. “I realize more clearly what I must do,” he wrote to Maud on May 10, as he awaited his orders to cross the Channel and experience for himself the horrors of modern warfare.65

  * These murals were overpainted in the 1940s and later destroyed when the restaurant burned down.

  * Jeremiah Suddaby had been for many years the principal of the Berlin Central School, renamed the Suddaby School after his death in 1910. Jackson received the commission thanks to a degree of nepotism: his grandfather, Alexander Young, was the Berlin Central School’s first principal when its doors opened in 1857.

  * The necessity of the CWRO’s efforts can be appreciated when one considers how two accounts of the Great War by British historians, Martin Gilbert’s 640-page The First World War: A Complete History (1994) and John Keegan’s 496-page The First World War (1998), make not a single mention of the Battle of Hill 70. As Beaverbrook realized, British and American military historians, eager to promote their own countrymen as protagonists, would inevitably downplay or disregard the Canadian contribution.

  * One of the more famous examples of this genre, Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus, entered the Musées royaux des beaux-arts only in 1912, after Varley left Belgium.

  8 THE DWELLER OF THE THRESHOLD

  MORALE AT “Camp Horror” had improved since Lawren Harris arrived in time for the riot in the hot summer of 1916. There was now a YMCA canteen selling cigarettes, and a wooden shed, known as “The Strand,” that showed silent films. But the base was still, for many recruits, a place of “dirt, dust, and loneliness.” 1

  Most recruits spent only three weeks before shipping overseas. Harris, though, stayed at Camp Borden for twice as long as the average recruit. He served as a musketry instructor, using his artistic talents to devise European cityscapes and realistic moving targets—“Fritzies that popped up and disappeared”—on which the recruits could practise their marksmanship.2 By the end of 1916 he was transferred to Toronto, where he gave instruction at the District School of Musketry, a rifle range improvised on the campus of the University of Toronto. The university had taken on the appearance of a military encampment, with tents sprouting on the lawns, soldiers and cadets everywhere, and the Royal Flying School occupying parts of Convocation Hall and Wycliffe College. In the newly built Hart House, wounded and shell-shocked soldiers were treated with hydrotherapy and massage.

  If Harris was unable to forget the war, his new posting at least allowed him to paint in the evenings and during his periods of leave. He even managed to exhibit a work at the OSA exhibition in 1917, a daringly vibrant canvas called (in an allusion to that favourite artistic tarte à la crème) Decorative Landscape. Another of his remarkable snow-and-fir compositions, it was the most adventurously decorative work he had ever produced. Painted around the same time that Thomson worked on The Jack Pine, it showed the blue silhouettes of pine trees in vivid relief against a sky painted with dabs of primrose yellow. In the foreground of this clangorous interplay of complementaries were swirls of blue and purple snow. Charlesworth dismissed it as a “garish poster.” 3

  Although living in Toronto and able to paint, Harris was deeply troubled through much of 1917, owing partly to his despair over the war and the death of Tom Thomson. He was also suffering from a spiritual malaise that made him doubt his artistic direction as well as his purpose in life. In the midst of his crisis he wrote a letter to MacDonald, describing his ailment in curiously abstract terms. He claimed he “felt curiously shifty as if in an element that was making great sport of me.” He found himself torn between “alluring impermanencies” and “even-more-attractive-at-the-time permanent things and nothings,” and he told MacDonald he did not feel “soul-steadied” and that he had “built everything . . . on sand.” 4

  One of the few other glimpses into his restless psychological condition can be found in some of the poems he began writing around this time. One of them, called “The Age,” expressed his gloomy attitude about society’s obsession with the material and the immediate at the expense of the eternal: “This is the age of the soul’s degradation, / Of tossing into the sun’s light / The dross and slime of life.” The vulgar celebrations of the superficially beautiful material world—what his poem called “glorying in the miserable glitter”—was not enough to compensate for “the soul’s great sadness.” 5

  Harris was the most religious of the painters in the Studio Building. He had been raised a devout Baptist by a mother who had since converted to Christian Science, a religion of “healthy-mindedness” that saw patients treated by “mental practitioners” rather than medical doctors. Although Harris did not convert to Christian Science, he too became more heterodox in his religious views, sharing Christian Science’s disillusionment with the materialism of the age and its desire for spiritual replenishment. The tension he felt between the material world’s “alluring impermanencies” and the “permanent things and nothings” of the spiritual world was one with which artists and writers had been grappling for the previous few decades. Edward Carpenter and Wassily Kandinsky both opposed the material view of the world—what Kandinsky condemned in 1911 as the “nightmare of materialism”—and predicted the coming of a spiritual revolution.6 But hopes for this new world of the spirit seemed to have died on the battlefields of the Great War.

  Perhaps as a prescription for his malaise, Harris used a week’s leave from the army in the first week of 1918 to visit New York. The city’s art galleries at this time offered, according to the New York Times, “innumerable entertainments.” 7 Which galleries and museums Harris visited is not known, but at the Modern Gallery he could have seen an exhibition of etchings, drawings and lithographs by Cézanne, Matisse, Raoul Dufy and Vlaminck. New York’s main attraction for him at this time, though, might have been the many works on show by members of The Eight (later known as the “Ashcan School”).8 One member, George Luks, had a solo exhibition at the Kraushaar Galleries on Fifth Avenue, while the Macbeth Gallery (where The Eight first showed their work together in 1908) featured a retrospective of the paintings and drawings of Arthur B. Davies. Another large display of the group’s work could be seen at the Bourgeois Galleries, where a benefit for American War Relief included work by both Luks as well as other members such as Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan and Everett Shinn.

  If his trip to New York was timed to coincide with these exhibitions by members of The Eight, Harris would have returned to Toronto with a renewed interest in scenes of modern urban life. He must also have noted how, through aggressive self-promotion, the enfants terribles of American art were steadily winning over both the public and the critics less than a decade after their first group exhibition attracted bitterly hostile reviews (“Bah! The whole thing creates a distinct feeling of nausea,” a critic had snorted at their 1908 show).9 He would furthermore have been sympathetic to Robert Henri’s avowed aim to take art to the masses (many of The Eight even published illustrations in a journal called The Masses) by democratizing a love of art and turning America into what he called “an art country.” 10

  While Harris was in New York, the New York Times devoted a long and laudatory article to Arthur B. Davies, one of the masterminds of the 1913 Armory Show and the painter possibly of most interest to Harris at this point. Unlike other members of The Eight, Davies expressed not the speed and cacophony of the city but silence and tranquility. His specialty, as in The Dweller on the Threshold, was ethereal female nudes dancing beside reflective lakes in mountain landscapes. The reviewer for the New York Times praised these canvases for their “long, continuous, linear rhythms,” their “grace of movem
ent,” and their “ceaseless flow of beauty.” 11 Another critic celebrated Davies as a “seer of visions” and a “poet who would penetrate this earthly envelope and surprise the secret fervors of the soul.” 12

  These paintings of what Harris might have called “permanent things and nothings” were inspired by Davies’s longstanding interest in mysticism and the occult. He was, along with Gauguin, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Nicholas Roerich and Gustaf Fjaestad, one of the many artistic followers of theosophy. Davies once met the Theosophical Society’s founder, H.P. Blavatsky, a photograph of whom he afterwards carried as a charm in the case of his pocket watch.13 Madame Blavatsky developed theosophy as a reaction against the stalemate reached by scientific materialism and orthodox religion, rejecting their dogmas and emphasizing the existence of a deeper spiritual reality beyond the world of matter. One of their objectives was “to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature . . . and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man.” 14 It was these deeper realities and hidden mysteries that artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky, abandoning representational art in favour of abstractions, sought to communicate through their paintings.

  Harris might first have been exposed to this exotic philosophy—